Community

Brotherhood Sister Sol's Mission of Transformative Support for At-Risk Youth Gets a New Home in Harlem

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 12:20:32 -0500

A vital community resource for nearly three decades, BroSis continues its mission from a new home designed by New York–based Urban Architectural Initiatives.

Workshops for Modernity: The Bauhaus Comes to Life Again at MoMA

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 00:00:00 -0500

Rarely does a museum show bring the shock of discovery to a familiar topic.

Women Push for Equality in the Architecture Profession

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 23:30:00 -0500

Last month, architectural record held its second annual Women in Architecture Forum and Awards in New York, with a packed crowd of architects (mostly women but some enthusiastic men) joining in the celebration.

First City

Fri, 16 Oct 2015 12:00:00 -0400

The Chicago Architecture Biennial sets the stage for both thinking and making. This month marks the opening of the first Chicago Architecture Biennial, which is also the first such event in North America (October 3'January 3).

An Object Lesson in Design for Everyone

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0400

In Finland, good architecture extends from a glass you hold to the city you live in. There are few countries whose modern identity is more closely linked to a rich culture of design and architecture than Finland. Its great exponent, of course, was Alvar Aalto (1898–1976), whose career exemplified the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk—or total work of art—meaning that his hand touched everything from master plans to glassware. Eliel Saarinen, half a generation his senior, held a similar position. Recalled Eero Saarinen, “My father used to say that, from an ashtray to a city plan, everything is architecture.” Photo © Michel

All in a Day's Work

Sun, 16 Aug 2015 12:00:00 -0400

The workplace is an ever-evolving design challenge. With continuous upgrades in technology, advances in telecommunications and rising costs of commercial real estate, space for individual employees keeps shrinking'whether for assistants or executives. The average allotment per office worker fell from 225 square feet in 2010 to 176 square feet in 2012, and these days can go as low as 60 square feet.

Beauty in Small Packages

Thu, 16 Jul 2015 12:00:00 -0400

Ingenious pavilions and a pair of bold cultural complexes offer surprise and delight. The Dallas-based architect Frank Welch recently sent me his just-published memoir, On Becoming an Architect. In the book, he describes how he, as an inquisitive, artistic young boy growing up in Sherman, Texas, during the Depression, became a critically acclaimed modernist whose distinguished career was cemented by one extraordinary project. Photo © Michel Arnaud The seminal building wasn't grandiose: it was a simple pavilion. A shelter set on a rocky rise on a ranch in West Texas, it opened to magnificent views across the rugged landscape. The

The Transformative Power of Architecture and the Arts

Mon, 15 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0400

In this issue of RECORD, we look at architecture in communities around the world that typically don't have access to good design.

Money Changes Everything

Sat, 16 May 2015 12:00:00 -0400

Architecture is a cyclical business. Just five years ago, the industry was down in the depths, and now the profession, by most measures, is rebounding.

After the Bubble Burst

Thu, 16 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Has the average new house changed since the recession—and what will the future look like? It is April, and at Architectural Record, our thoughts turn to houses—the beautiful, innovative custom dwellings, featured in the pages ahead, where architects experiment with form and materials on a domestic scale and push design ideas in often radical new directions. Photo © Michel Arnaud But before we get to RECORD Houses—and the best designs of the year—let's pause to look at the broader scene for quotidian residential building in the U.S. today. With the bursting of the housing bubble now behind us, and the

Civic Architecture Comes Down to Earth

Mon, 16 Mar 2015 12:30:00 -0400

Exemplary, if modest, design in the public realm is directly engaging communities What is civic architecture today? Some of the best examples are surprisingly modest. The sense of majesty once expressed by public buildings'a grand, domed courthouse overlooking a town square; a temple-front city hall dominating an urban core'is part of the distant past. Public architecture has come down off its podium to engage cities and citizens. Photo © Michel Arnaud In looking at new civic architecture for this issue, RECORD'S editors came across a remarkable number of innovative libraries. Not so long ago, the public library was a passive

A Delicate Balance

Sun, 15 Feb 2015 00:00:00 -0500

How to honor the layers of history and express the culture of today. This spring marks the 50th anniversary of the law that created New York City's Landmarks Preservation Commission. It is not the oldest such law in the country'cities like Charleston, Baltimore, and New Orleans had protections against the destruction of historic property much earlier'but New York's is considered a national model because it is so comprehensive, according to Andrew Dolkart, professor of preservation at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The statute is broad'it can be applied to single buildings, interiors, or entire neighborhoods. And

A Primer for School Design in the 21st Century

Fri, 16 Jan 2015 12:00:00 -0500

A modernist icon that married architecture and pedagogy remains influential today. When the Crow Island Elementary School in Winnetka, Illinois opened in 1940, it launched a revolution in the architecture of schools. Designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen, and the Chicago firm then known as Perkins, Wheeler & Will, the welcoming, low-slung, one-story brick building, with a slender, beacon-like clock tower, was hugely influential in the postwar rush to construct new schools for the incoming tide of baby boomers. The earlier 20th-century model of stately, historicist multistory school buildings, that spoke more to the aspirations of town fathers than to

When More Is Less

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 12:00:00 -0500

With this issue of RECORD, we celebrate the 15th edition of Design Vanguard, our annual selection of 10 of the most promising architecture firms emerging on the global stage.

Big Ideas on Campus

Sat, 15 Nov 2014 23:30:00 -0500

As sure as the Harvard–Yale football game (or just The Game to its passionate alumni) is played every November, so does RECORD bring you our annual Top 10 architecture school lists.

On the Cover: City Life

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 12:00:00 -0400

Two museums by Frank Gehry redefine their settings, and RECORD looks at challenges of success for popular urban centers. Photo © Michael Arnaud Related Links: Gehry's New Museums Fondation Louis Vuitton Biomuseo Don't be confused if the issue of ARCHITECTURAL RECORD you're reading doesn't look like everyone else's. We created two covers this month—half of our readers are receiving one, and half the other—because two very different museums, both designed by Frank Gehry, are opening in October, and each has a compelling story about its design and construction. Maybe you're looking at the magazine with the highly anticipated Fondation Louis

Honors for Women

Tue, 16 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Celebrating design leadership in a culture of collaboration. Recently we've seen, in print and online, a reprise of old debates about starchitects. The critic Witold Rybczynski complained that big-name architects don't design their best work in cities that are foreign to them, because they don't understand the context. He proposed turning to local architects, whom he called “locatects.” Not long afterward, the architect and Yale professor Peggy Deamer wrote to The New York Times, arguing that several high-profile architects, through news coverage of various controversies, were giving architecture a bad name.

But Is It Art?

Sat, 16 Aug 2014 12:00:00 -0400

This past spring, the sculptor Richard Serra was honored with the President's Medal from the venerable Architectural League of New York, which cited his evolution as an artist from the “concerns of matter and materiality to more spatial preoccupations.”

Modernism in the Rearview Mirror

Wed, 16 Jul 2014 12:00:00 -0400

This Venice Biennale just looks back, without an eye to the future. Venice is a city that resists the contemporary. New architecture tends to be discreetly inserted behind the facades of historic structures, as in recent interventions designed by Tadao Ando or Annabelle Selldorf. So the contrast between the historic city and the contemporary architecture that typically fills the Venice Architecture Biennale is particularly acute. Photo © Michael Arnaud Related Links Critique: Rem’s Rules Venice Dispatch: Highlights from the National Pavilions Venice Dispatch: Golden Lions for Phyllis Lambert and Korean Pavilion Venice Dispatch: U.S. Architecture as American Export—The Story Expertly

Ethics and Architecture

Mon, 16 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0400

How many ways can architects engage with the communities and wider world around them? Here are some randomly selected news stories from the last month: • Rising temperatures and climate change are already here, contributing to the current extremes of droughts, wildfires, heat waves, and floods that are devastating regions of our country. • A botched execution by lethal injection in Oklahoma caused obvious suffering to the inmate, who then died of a heart attack. • French economist Thomas Piketty's runaway bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century—which posits that global economic inequality will widen with disastrous results, unless governments intervene

Transformations

Fri, 16 May 2014 12:00:00 -0400

New architecture's impact on the urban realm, from Los Angeles to Glasgow to Rio In the pages of RECORD, we like to explore a work of architecture not only for the strength of its design but for the impact on its surroundings. In this issue, we look at several new cultural projects that are having a profound effect on urban sites. Steven Holl's controversial addition to the Glasgow School of Art, opposite Charles Rennie Mackintosh's early 20th-century masterpiece, brings a sense of lightness—with its luminous translucent glass skin—to that gritty Scottish city, where it rains more than half the year.

How We Live, Now and in the Future

Wed, 16 Apr 2014 00:00:00 -0400

RECORD Houses Connect to Their Surroundings—or Create Their Own Environment T.S. Eliot may have thought April was the cruelest month, but here at Architectural Record, we look on the bright side because it's time for our annual RECORD Houses awards. Now in its sixth decade, the Houses issue is always full of surprises, with our selection of the best new projects by architects who experiment with form and materials on a domestic scale, often in spectacular settings. Photo © Michael Arnaud Renzo Piano never designs houses (not counting the Diogene, a tiny—8 foot by 10 foot—prototype of a sustainable cabin

Supersize It« Back to Super-size Design

Sun, 16 Mar 2014 12:30:00 -0400

Twenty years ago, Rem Koolhaas published a fat doorstop of a book, S, M, L, XL, which included his manifesto on Bigness: “Bigness is ultimate architecture,” he wrote. “Only Bigness instigates the regime of complexity that mobilizes the full intelligence of architecture and its related fields.”

R.I.P., Folk Art Building

Sat, 15 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0500

MoMA rushes to raze Midtown Manhattan gem. Photo © MichaelMoran/OTTO The Folk Art Museum building's stair contained niches for objects in the collection and led visitors through the narrow structure. Next month, RECORD will present projects by architects who give new life to old buildings through thoughtful renovation or adaptive reuse. Unfortunately, that kind of creative thinking wasn't brought to bear to save the acclaimed former home of the American Folk Art Museum from demolition. Designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, and opened in late 2001, this little gem in Midtown Manhattan—six stories high and only 40 feet wide,

Shouting the Praises of Quiet Design

Thu, 16 Jan 2014 12:00:00 -0500

Not every work of architecture has to compete for our attention Building a new museum is like making a movie with a big cast of characters. There's the architect as director, the board of trustees (the producers), the curators with a story to tell in the galleries (the screenwriters), and a horde of technical consultants. Looming in the background is the reality of the budget'if value engineering is too severe, it's like canceling an Alpine location to shoot on a soundstage with fake snow. And just as Hollywood rushes to release movies before the end of the year'to be eligible

Think Global, Act Local

Mon, 16 Dec 2013 12:00:00 -0500

Young architects deploy new tools to advance common values Design Vanguard, our annual look at the best emerging architectural practices, is a window into the future, a glimpse of where the profession is heading. This year, two of our 10 winning firms are from Spain (despite the country's damaging recession) with work that demonstrates a powerful materiality, such as Venecia Park by Héctor Fernández Elorza Architects, featured on our cover. Other international winners come from Mexico, Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong. We're pleased, as well, to honor four U.S. practices—though young American architects have often had less opportunity to build

Design, Technology, and the City

Fri, 15 Nov 2013 23:30:00 -0500

The present moment may be full of uncertainties, but this month, RECORD is focusing on the future.

Letters to the Editor

Wed, 30 Oct 2013 12:00:00 -0400

Debra M. Phillips of the American Chemistry Council Responds to “Making Sense of the New LEED” In response to the piece by Nadav Malin (“Making Sense of the New LEED”) that recently ran in your publication, I am writing to make clear that the American Chemistry Council (ACC) strongly supports energy efficiency and green building. In fact, chemistry is responsible for many of the innovations and technologies that make energy efficiency and green building possible. ACC has historically been supportive of LEED. But we are concerned that LEED v.4 has strayed from its original mission of promoting energy efficiency and

Change Agent

Wed, 16 Oct 2013 12:00:00 -0400

The end of an era in New York—and a new future for cities and technology. Two years ago, RECORD published an award-winning feature devoted to the evolution of New York City in the decade since 9/11. We gave much of the credit for the city's newfound vibrancy to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, under whose administration exemplary urban design and architecture have flourished. The vast enhancement of the public realm—hundreds of acres of new parks, especially on the waterfronts; miles of bike lanes; pedestrian plazas; handsome new civic and cultural buildings—have created a dynamic and alluring urban environment for residents and tourists,

A View with a Room

Mon, 16 Sep 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Record looks at how interiors bring the outside in. The exhibition Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (through September 23), explores a provocative theme: that the giant of 20th-century architecture is wrongly categorized as an International Style designer whose “machines for living in,” as he termed them, could be plunked down anywhere. Rather, argue the curators Jean-Louis Cohen and Barry Bergdoll, Le Corbusier was a keen observer of nature and landscapes, which informed almost everything he touched, from the master plan for a city to the design of a single